It was "always more comfortable for me to write women": Woody Allen. Photo: AAP

Like many protagonists in Woody Allen's movies, the title character in his new film, Blue Jasmine, sometimes speaks with a familiar stammer and exhibits a telltale existential dread. But beyond that, she could hardly be more different from her creator.

Jasmine, a fallen New York socialite played by Cate Blanchett, is left emotionally brittle by the deceptions of her husband (Alec Baldwin), a philanderer and financial huckster. Having fled to San Francisco to start anew, she is oblivious to the calamities that have stripped her of her station. She continues to be obsessed with class, status and luxury brands, and knows how to pronounce the name Louis Vuitton for maximum annoyance.

The guys are usually inferior, because they're less grounded than the women.

For all the illusions torn away from her by the end of Blue Jasmine, a comedy-drama written and directed by Allen, she stands as his latest distinctive female character in a roster full of them.

Woody Allen's leading ladies

Cate Blanchett and Woody Allen on the set of Blue Jasmine.

In the span of more than 40 of Allen's films, including Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, strong and memorable women have become as much a hallmark of his movies as the venerable Windsor font in their credits. These are women who dominate and who are subjugated, who struggle and love and kvetch and fall apart, but they rarely conform to stereotypes. Jasmine may be deeply troubled, but at least she's deep. Yet almost nothing connects these characters - who have been played by actors including Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz - except that they have sprung from the mind of the same filmmaker, one who professes no real insight into how he writes and casts his female characters, but remains confident he still knows how to create them.

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''People have criticised me for being narcissistic,'' Allen says. ''People criticised me for being a self-hating Jew, that's come up. But not being able to create good women was not aimed at me very often.''

Allen may not wish to recall it, but his movies have also drawn charges of chauvinism and sexism by detractors who have said they frequently depicted women as neurotics, shrews and prostitutes.

This chorus reached a climax of sorts in the 1990s, when acerbic films such as Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry were released, and he had his notorious break-up with his frequent co-star Mia Farrow, who discovered his relationship with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, now Allen's wife. As the critic Steven Vineberg wrote in a 1998 essay, ''more and more, 'Woody' [Allen's onscreen persona] has taken on the uncomfortable role of apologist for Woody, whose woman problems are by now as well known as his movies.''

Still, Allen has continued to create a steady supply of substantial roles for women, often of ages unrecognised by Hollywood (that is, over 30). For successive generations of female actors, the opportunity to work in one of Allen's films has become a kind of career validation. And in the phase of his career that began with the 2005 release of Match Point, Allen has delved into female characters who are further removed from his familiar life experiences.

Johansson, who starred in Match Point, Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, writes in an email that Allen ''appreciates the versatility of the heroine, her ability to be both doe and lioness''.

''His openness to the possibility that a woman can be both hunter and hunted allows him to explore more deeply the complexity of the female spirit,'' she says.

Allen, 77, cannot immediately account for why women figure prominently in his work, except that, well, they interest him. ''They're attractive, they're complex, and the guys have never been portrayed superior to the women,'' he says. ''The guys are usually inferior, because they're less grounded than the women.''

That surely applies to the nebbish Allen often plays in his own films. But those closest to him say the filmmaker should not be confused with his awkward, unknowing onscreen alter ego.

''That's a role he can play easily,'' says Letty Aronson, Allen's sister and long-time producer. ''It's almost as if that's what people expect. They don't expect him to be a Cary Grant type.''

Allen credits his romantic relationship with Keaton, which began in the 1970s, with opening his eyes to the potential of female characters. In his earliest films, ''whether it was Bananas or Sleeper or Play It Again, Sam, whatever silly little thing, they were always from a male point of view'' - even Annie Hall, which begins with Alvy Singer speaking directly to the audience.

But when he started dating Keaton, Allen says, ''I started to appreciate her so much, personally and as an actress, that I started writing from the woman's point of view.'' In the movies that followed Annie Hall, the director says, it was ''always more comfortable for me to write women''.

As Keaton recalls, their relationship was not unlike Annie Hall, with Allen becoming both her partner and mentor, offering her an attentive ear and introducing her to Freudian analysis. ''I was constantly complaining about things and constantly had this low self-esteem,'' Keaton says, ''and had a tendency toward crying and worrying about why I wasn't good enough, and he took it.''

The surest sign that Allen was listening to her was when she read his script for Annie Hall (which Allen co-wrote with Marshall Brickman) and her character's voice sounded just like her.

In the years since, Allen has had little trouble casting the female actors he has wanted, landing Geraldine Page, Julia Roberts and Judy Davis, and helping earn Oscars for Wiest (a two-time winner, for Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets over Broadway), Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite) and Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona).

If anything, Allen's practice of paying actors far less than they make on other films has driven away more men than women. ''We have no money and everyone knows it, and they think it's kind of humorous now,'' says Juliet Taylor, Allen's veteran casting director. ''There are people who have said, 'I just don't work for less than my price' - mostly American male movie stars.''

When she was a casting assistant on Bananas in 1971, Taylor recalls that ''when an actress would come in, the producer would talk to them because Woody was too shy''.

Today, ''many of his good friends are women'', she says. ''He is one of the guys who you can really sit and chat on the phone with for hours.''

Allen says his female characters sometimes spring from his own best guesses of how women might react in certain situations. ''Now this does not mean I feel it or think it accurately all the time,'' he says. ''I don't.'' But in the case of Jasmine, she was inspired by a woman he'd heard about from his wife.

This woman, Allen says, was ''a very high Upper East Side liver'' who ''had a precipitous drop and had to downsize radically''.

''She went from someone with charge accounts every place and a limitless amount of money, virtually, to someone who had to shop in bargain places and even get a job,'' he says.

Allen sensed the makings of classic tragedy. ''If there was some way that she brought it on herself, it could fulfil some of those Greek requirements,'' he says.

The Jasmine character may well invite further criticism of Allen's perspective on women, particularly whether there is something antiquated about the idea of a woman whose world is shattered when she loses her money and her man.

But Blanchett says she has known similar people.

''By circumstance or lack of confidence, their identity gets consumed by their partner,'' she says. ''Before they realise it, they've given away a lot of their autonomy and settled for security, and made a series of compromises.''

Though Blanchett played a similarly lost soul as Blanche DuBois in the Sydney Theatre Company's heralded production of A Streetcar Named Desire, she says Blue Jasmine more immediately reminded her of playing Shakespeare's Richard II, of ''that sense of falling from grace, the delusion, the interface between the role you're given and the one you're longing to inhabit''.

Having played the opposite sex in the film I'm Not There, Blanchett says she found a freedom in it that Allen might also take from writing women's roles.

''Often you can write more closely about your own perspective and experience of the world through a character of a different gender,'' she says.

Blanchett says she tried to suggest as much to Allen while working on a scene for Blue Jasmine. ''I said, 'How would you do this, Mr Allen?''' she recalls. ''And he said, 'Well, if I were playing the role …' and I turned to him with a backwards grin and said, 'You know, you could have played this role.'''

Allen paused and thought about it ''for a good minute and a half, and then he said, 'No, it would have been too comic.'''

Allen - who cast himself as Blanche DuBois and Keaton as Stanley Kowalski for a comic re-enactment of A Streetcar Named Desire in his film Sleeper - says he often yearns to play the kinds of women he writes, who are given licence to be ''emotional and sarcastic and flamboyant''.

''I always wanted to play those parts,'' he says. ''I always felt I could play them because I feel those kinds of things.''

Johansson affirms Allen has a feminine side in him that longs to break out.

''I believe Woody, at heart, would have been happiest to have been born as the classic opera diva,'' she says. ''He lives for dramatic flair, gossip, intrigue, crippling heartache and turmoil - just as long as it's happening to someone else.''